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Impossible footage of ‘little people’

Pavel sent me this great footage from a 1977 Czechoslovakian children’s television show and containing an extraordinary realistic depiction of ‘little people’. There is no CGI, green screen, no rottoscoping, or postproduction.

Perspective; “little people” are farther in the background than it seems, working with over-sized objects. The few things that are in both the background and the foreground have something blocking the transition in size. Funny the boy never touches the background and the “little people” are never in the foreground. Must have been tough to get the transitions right, but artists have been deeply studying perspective for half a millenium.

There’s a scene at the end of Casablanca where mechanics are preparing an aircraft. It was all filmed in the studio so in order to create the illusion of distance they used dwarfs and a scaled down plane. If you look carefully you can tell.

However, in the case of the video posted above I would tend to go with edgar1975 and giant children. That or witchcraft,

Forced perspective. I thought there might be some matte work until I read in the description there was no post production work which rules that out but on a second look I could see it was all a clever use of forced perspective. If that does the job then there’s no need for modern techniques which are often not as convincing as they are thought to be.

I thought everyone knew that the coommies bread small people in captivity. It’s sorta like bonzai kittens but with babies. The trick was to give the pregnant mothers chemicals that would make the babies’ bones as soft and bendy as a kittens.

It’s looks very well done but not perfect. There is an inconsistency in the grass on the left. The white box with the pole and the kid pretending to scope out whatever is very impressive but his head movements watching the guy falling and climbing are just a little off. It seems the kids are up on a small cliff set back from the little people.

Forced perspective, but it also looks like they filmed it at a lower film speed (making the playback appear slightly sped up). The higher speed sells the idea that the little people are smaller, and the children in the foreground barely move, so you don’t notice it on them.